Nick Carroll – 1

Nick Carroll – 1 The Interview: Nick Carroll Alex Leonard: How did you start writing, Nick? Nick Carroll: I started writing for fun almost as soon as I’d figured out how to write all the letters of the alphabet. The atmosphere at home was always one of respect for reading and writing and the power of the written word; Dad was a journalist and Mum was a very intelligent, well-read woman. There were always books around. I was slightly introverted and spent more time than most kids by myself, buried in piles of them, trying to imagine my way into their pages. I’m still a total bookworm and often confuse the crap out of professional surfers with what I drag along as reading matter on surf trips. I wrote for the school papers and all that stuff, but my first published article was an interview with Gerry Lopez for People magazine in 1975. It was at the suggestion of my Dad, who opened the door to the magazine thanks to his position at Fairfax. Lopez was in Sydney for the Coke Surfabout and the people in charge knew where he was staying. Can you imagine? Gerry Lopez! Mr Pipeline! The editor made a time for me to visit, Dad dropped me off at these apartments in Collaroy, and I walked up the stairs feeling like I was about three feet tall…terrified. Knocked on the door, a guy answered, ‘Oh yeah, Gerry,’ and THERE HE WAS standing in front of me, surrounded by three or four hangers-on. The hangers-on leered at me but Gerry was the soul of politesse – invited me in, let me ask him the questions I’d laboriously scrawled out on a piece of schoolbook paper, and answered them into my primitive big black tape recorder. It all went fine, but what I most remember is saying goodbye, and hearing a vast wave of laughter rise up and crash into the door as it swung shut behind me. They must have thought that little Aussie grom was hilarious. Writing as I said was first for fun but it swiftly became something more – a way of exerting myself, an outlet for my curiosity and desire to observe the world and not just walk through it. What was your first job in a surfing magazine? I got a job at Tracks in early 1981. This was at a moment in my life when I’d become fairly sure of a couple of things: I’d worked for about a year as a landscape gardener’s labourer and couldn’t imagine another day of it; I’d played at being a professional surfer and sensed it wasn’t for me, partly because it so clearly was for my little brother; and I really wanted to work as a writer of some sort. The job was that of associate editor and it’d been held by Phil Abraham, a very smart and professional journalist; Paul Holmes was the editor. I’d done a few articles for Tracks before, and they’d been super fun, and I’d always had a weakness for the mag, ever since my first page of Captain Goodvibes around eight or nine years previously. Holmes gave me my first office assignment, which was to go and interview Simon Anderson about his ridiculous new surfboard idea, the three-fin, which he’d called (without even a twinkle in his eye) the Thruster. I went and talked with Simon, wrote the piece, and Holmes dissected it without mercy. I’d written some dumb line about how it was ‘easy to see how functional the reality is’ of three fins. ‘How functional’s YOUR reality?’ Holmes asked me, curling his lip. The work was weird, like nothing I’d ever done. Art direction? Page galleys? AD SALESMEN? What the hell were they? We knew absolutely fuck all about what we were doing. I loved every second of it. kurungabaa vol. 1 no. 2, july 2008 Nick Carroll – 2 What surfing magazines were you reading as a grom? I read Tracks , Surfing World , and the occasional copy of Surfing and Surfer , but they were as nothing at first compared with the impact of Paul Hamlyn’s book A History of Australian Surfing . This book, a big hard cover volume, was a product of the just-pre-shortboard days, around the mid-1960s – the hot young surfer featured was Bobby Brown surfing Sandon Point with these amazing soul arch bottom turns, and there was a two-page spread entitled ‘Midget Shows How’ with Midget in colour pics deftly trimming and banking along small waves at Palm Beach. I used to stare at the angles on some of those waves and just dream of riding across them – I still think about them actually. That book was quickly swamped by SW and Tracks as I and my mates got better and better, but it stayed there as a kind of reference point for a long time. It also kind of tied the whole idea of surfing in Oz together for me – it didn’t separate the history of surf clubs and other beach culture stuff from the history of surfboards and wave riding, but showed them all as one kind of over-arching Australian focus on waves and surfing. Later research I’ve done confirms the impression I was given by that book – that the kind of person who learned to bodysurf at Manly in 1907 was the same kind of person who got heavily into surfing in the 1970s, the 1990s, and for that matter now. Whose surf journalism did you admire in those days? I tended to admire individual pieces, and whole issues of particular mags, more than writers generically. The Tracks published just after the May 1974 east coast storms really affected me strongly: the care and effort that went into describing what had happened and giving it a context, and the sheer awe of Nature’s energy…they’d felt what I’d felt and it resonated. SW ’s Magic School issue, I know I and the other hot Aussie juniors of the time were really honoured by that magazine, it was awesome to be taken seriously as surfers for the first time. Phil Jarratt’s piece on the first Stubbies contest is the benchmark for high-impact Aussie surf journalism. But writers: the American short-term Tracks editor John Grissim, Jarratt for sure because he was bloody funny yet actually reporting well at the same time, Witzig occasionally because of his obvious intelligence, Dr Geoff because he knew what the fuck he was talking about and was happy to share, and probably a dozen others. Everyone who writes for a magazine has a bright moment and I reckon I’ve read them all. How was working as editor of Tracks ? I was fortunate to work on the mag for a couple of years under Kirky before taking over as editor full- on, and so learn the ropes of magazine production. Creativity schmeativity. Here’s a thing all good magazine editors learn fairly early: mags are practical operations, running them is about practical application and understanding how to put everything in place so the machine works well in all phases. Tracks was a simple enough machine and it was very hands-on: typewriters, phototypesetting, manual layout, B&W print film, etc. So I got to concentrate on learning magazine structure: what depts did I want and where should they fall? How big could a feature be and how small? Where were the weaknesses in wider reader appeal? For me these things came naturally and I relished the chance to put ideas to work. I sorta felt like it was my natural task to be Tracks editor, to continue some of the flow of Jarratt-inspired anti authoritarianism, but at the same time to reflect the changes that were happening in the sport at the time, as the pro thing strove to become fully recognised and surfers like Occ, Curren, little brother, Pottz, Elko etc. surged forward. If I was making compromises at the time, I kurungabaa vol. 1 no. 2, july 2008 Nick Carroll – 3 was too young and full-forward to notice them. I really loved reporting most of all and would go to Hawaii for two months or more every winter and write big in-depth features, trying to explain to both the readers and to myself the impact of Hawaiian surf and the North Shore in general on the sport. I guess beyond that the important things it all gave me were a solid practical grounding in magazine theory, the chance to write probably half a million words on a typewriter and thus begin to get a knowledge of writing, and the chance to fulfil a bit of a dream of being the mag’s editor. I was proud of what my crew and I did with Tracks through the period; we raised circulation by around 15%, increased ad revenue, and left the mag better than when we found it. I have one regret born of my own incompleteness: I don’t feel that I nurtured enough talent while I was at Tracks . I was just too full-forward and wanted to do everything myself. DC Green got going at the time, Andrew Kidman was a work experience grom who had to sit in the back of my falling- apart Mazda on the way to town each day, and when I was preparing to leave as editor we hired Tim Baker to be Reggae’s deputy ed – but then Baker basically chose himself, it wasn’t because we were so all fired smart to pick him, he was such a good applicant that nobody else came close…but there was no real system to it.

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